[ { "id": 211338, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1988", "page_number": 54, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "30\n\nhad already departed. Of the original allied commissioners, only Harry Parkes was still there for the final ceremony which included a tri-national group of Chinese, French, and British dignitaries.\n\nIf the allied occupation of Canton was not as uneventful as some historical accounts record, it nevertheless had very successful elements to it and may have had an influential impact on future Sino-European relations. At least two employees of the Allied Commission, Robert Hart and Prosper Giquel, both young men at the time, went on to play major roles in future Sino-European co-operative ventures later in the century, Robert Hart as the famous director of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and Prosper Giquel as the future European Director of the Foochow Dockyard and eventually head of several Sino-European Educational Missions of the 1870s and 1880s. That their earlier experiences had been in the somewhat more co-operative world of the Sino-European police forces and the Sino-European coolie emigration inspection teams is certainly likely to have proved significant in the careers of these two men who were later so much more able than most of their countrymen to work with the Chinese on an equal basis.\n\nNOTES\n\nAbbreviations\n\nAE Archives de la Ministère des Affaires Etrangères\n\nCCC Correspondence consulaire et commerciale\n\nCP Correspondence politique, Chine\n\nArmee Les Archives de l'Armee de Terre, Vincennes\n\nFO British Foreign Office\n\nPRO British Public Record Office\n\nSHM Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes\n\nAN Archives Nationales\n\nRanbir Vohra, China's Path To Modernization: A Historical Review from 1800 to the Present (New Jersey, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1987) citing Christopher Hibbert, The Dragon Awakes. China and the West 1793-1911 (N.Y., Harper and Row, 1970), p. 229.\n\n2 Douglas Hurd, The Arrow War, Anglo-Chinese Confusion 1856-1860 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1967), pp. 121-125 and Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, The Rise of Modern China, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 121-125.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212711, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1992", "page_number": 20, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "shy of sharing their knowledge with us, possibly, and perhaps understandably, wishing to retain family privacy.\n\nComparatively few of his autobiographical ‘facts' have been verified though he does assure us at the beginning of at least one of his autobiographical essays that it contains 'facts not fiction'. The autobiographical paragraphs and snippets scattered throughout his Miscellanies appear to have been honest and candid in so far as his revealed details. There is no reason to doubt anything he has written, anything dishonest, though with his statement that he is a 'self-proclaimed publicist,' one cannot help coming to the conclusion that there are times when he doth protest too much and that some of the details are slightly more supportive of his claims than one would have thought strictly true or indeed necessary. One is often left with more than a slight suspicion that Mesny had a touch of Walter Mitty about him, and in a number of his exploits one suspects he has embellished an already good story. The chapters of this biography on The Early Years, The Pacification of the Miao, and the Later Years, are to all intents and purposes autobiographical, and much of the substance of these chapters may seem to be grandiloquently worded, pompous and stilted. This is because I have transcribed most of the anecdotes written by Mesny in the first person singular into the 'third person' otherwise leaving the narrative as a whole as it was in the Miscellanies to provide the reader with a distinct and palpable feel for his personality.\n\nAt least three potted biographies of Mesny have been written, beginning with an entry in Balleine's Biographical Dictionary.2 Later, a piece in The Pilot's first volume (July 1946) which described The (Jersey) Trinity Boy who became a Chinese General, under the general heading of ‘Adventurous Jerseymen.' This was repeated in The Pilot of July 1980. Douglas Ford of the Jersey Museum added a little to Balleine and The Pilot in his 'From Jersey to the Celestial Empire' [undated], and when the Jersey Post Office produced its stamp series in May 1992 commemorating the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Mesny's birth they issued a short piece which added yet more about him. These were all laudatory describing Mesny's adventures and successes without portraying the unromantic and often wretched side to his life. These hyperbolised descriptions occasionally lead to erroneous claims such as the assertion that Mesny always wore Chinese clothes. In practice he wore foreign clothes most of the time and only donned Chinese robes for some fifteen years, when he had his photograph taken with his son and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212721, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1992", "page_number": 30, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "'Union'. There was no indication that either Mesny or Kahler realized the implication behind the extraordinary ugliness of the emperor nor that the print had anti-Manchu secret society connotations.\n\nThe only time Mesny refers to photography was when Pickerell, his friend in Hankow in about 1864/5 who knew something of the rudiments of the art, 'then very imperfectly understood,' added Mesny, had produced some very good negatives and positives on glass of his Chinese employers. This spread Pickerell's fame and brought him lots of business. The colodion gave out and none was to be obtained at any price. Mesny tells us in his Miscellany that he knew how to make it and produced some which served the purpose until a supply could be obtained from Hong Kong. This yet again highlights the enigma of how did Mesny keep abreast with European and American business and scientific advances whilst in remote parts of China, and how did he, at the age of 22 or 23, in the heart of China, having left Jersey some ten years earlier, know anything about photography and in particular the constituents of colodion and how to make it?\n\nThe illustrations provided by the Jersey Post Office on the commemorative stamps are interesting illustrations of how the present day artist imagined Mesny and his surroundings. They should therefore be regarded as fanciful representations rather than accurate depictions. Mesny, for example, at no time appears to have worn the square badge of the civil official as portrayed in the illustration with Governor Chang. Again, he was never a 'Mandarin first class', he was a 'military official second class.' Finally, at no stage did he ever refer to himself at 'the River Gate.' Every walled town down the Yangtze would have had one but Mesny, himself, never mentioned the term and again, to our knowledge, was not on the Yangtze in 1874.\n\nNOTES\n\nThe Manchu dynasty was actually descended from the Jürchen, the so-called Golden Horde. The Manchus in China were neither Mongol nor even, strictly speaking, autochthonous Manchus but Jürchen conquerors from Manchuria\n\n1 Balleine G R: A Biographical Dictionary of Jersey Staples Press: London\n\nReady O: Life and Sport in China London. 1904\n\nPage 30\n\nPage 31", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212734, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1992", "page_number": 43, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "28\n\n[yun-yen].\n\nIn October 1874, at the age of 32, Mesny returned to Hankow from Kueichou with the rank of Major-General and, he claimed, an excellent letter of recommendation from the Governor of Kueichou, addressed to Prince Kung and the Ministers of the Tsung-li Yamen in Peking. In 1886 he was promoted to the brevet rank of Lieutenant-General.\n\nIn his autobiographical ‘obituary' in the North China Herald, Mesny wrote \"The confirmation of my rank as a Major-General in the Chinese Army with the decoration of the Kualing [hua-ling] Plume, the order of the Pa-t'u-lu and promotion to be Brevet Lieutenant-General, with ancestors ennobled for three generations, was published in the Peking gazette, and the documents handed to me by the British Legation officials at Peking, and by the British Consul at Canton\": His decoration, the San-tai Erh-pin Kao-feng, an honorary title and patent of retrospective rank conferred upon meritorious officials, their wives and their immediate ancestors for three generations, was recommended to the Throne by the Governor of Kueichou, Ts’en Yü-ying, in 1879. [Grandfather Guillaume Mesny, who had died many, many years earlier and who was now presumably in the Afterworld, must have been most surprised, to say the least!]\n\nMesny also handed out awards and decorations: During his first campaign in Kueichou, Mesny had a supply of Meritorious Warrants (kung-p'ai [which confers the right of the recipient to wear a button on his hat, normally the fifth or sixth degree with blue feathers]). His supply was already sealed with the commander-in-chief's seal, and Mesny bestowed them on meritorious men after each battle, adding the name of the recipient, the date, etc., and Mesny's own seal. He also had hundreds of the Military Silver Medal [Chung-kung Yin-pai] made during the war in Kueichou from 1867-1874, at his own expense, and bestowed them as rewards to deserving soldiers. It consisted of a thin piece of silver about three and a half inches at its longest diameter, with a slit in it for a ribbon, and the character Shang \"Bestowed\" in repoussé work stamped upon it.\n\nHis ranks and grades during his service with the Chinese Imperial forces are a more complex subject and one that is far from clear from Mesny's own writings. He portrayed himself as having 'senior' mandarin rank, and this has been reflected in one of the postage stamps produced by the Jersey Post Office in 1992, on which he is depicted as a 'Mandarin'.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212817, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1992", "page_number": 126, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Jersey Post Office Commemorative Stamps William Mesny 150th Anniversary of his Birth, 1992\n\n―\n\nJERSEY\n\n1860, William Mesny, Shanghai\n\nV. Ambrus\n\n1992\n\n1860, William Mesny, Shanghai\n\nJERSEY\n\n1862.\n\nV. Ambrus\n\n1992\n\n1862, Running the Taiping Blockade\n\n16P\n\nCartor\n\nCarlor", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 } ]